Although you might not know it from the headlines about legalising brothels, the government announced a crackdown on prostitution this week. That is certainly welcome, as far as it goes: prostitution is booming and official Britain has now acknowledged that the buying of sex is not just a fact of life but an expression of men's power over women, which would not exist in a free and equal society.

And yet the impact of prostitution goes far wider than kerb crawlers and red-light districts. Its influence now permeates our culture, from music and the media to advertising and fashion, with the result that selling sex has become normalised in public life. Former prostitutes write sex columns in newspapers; men's magazines promote the sex industry; "pimp chic" is fashionable. If the legislation is to work, a broader challenge to the way we have come to see prostitution is needed.

The government's proposals - apart from the misguided notion of legalising small brothels - are sensible. A national campaign against kerb crawling and a drive against street prostitution are necessary because many more men now visit prostitutes: a study published last month showed that in 2000, more than 9% had paid for sex, a sharp increase on 5.6% in 1990. Sex tourism, often under the cover of stag weekends, is widespread, and the surge in sex traffic has meant that Britain is now flooded with desperate women tricked or forced into prostitution. The services women are expected to provide for their clients have expanded, with previous taboos such as kissing and anal sex becoming mainstream. And the government has at last acknowledged that prostitution is not a crime without a victim, and that men who pay for sex are abusers - "scummy men", in the words of the Arctic Monkeys song.

But what about areas of life beyond legislation? The sudden increase in men paying for sex is reflected in, and in many ways facilitated by, our wider public culture. The sexualisation of British life has been rapid and comprehensive; and in the process the sex industry has been made to seem ordinary, presented as an acceptable late-night or between-meetings occupation for men - and just another career choice for women.

So we now have two Sunday newspapers featuring "sex columnists", whose qualification is that they buy or sell sex. The Sunday Telegraph offers its middle England readers sex tips from "Belle de Jour", an ex-prostitute who also gained a blog prize from the Guardian's website, and a book deal; the Observer presents the greasy-gloved Sebastian Horsley, a man who claims to have slept with 1,000 prostitutes and is given to saying things like: "What I hate with women generally is the intimacy"; "The whore fuck is the purest fuck of all"; and "The problem is that the modern woman is a prostitute who doesn't deliver the goods". It's as if those who buy and sell sex are the best at it - as if sex was nothing to do with intimacy, emotion, or a physical connection between people. What defines good sex is that money has changed hands.

Meanwhile, lads' magazines continue their assault on British women with articles that aggressively blur the line between girlfriend/boyfriend and prostitute/punter relationships. FHM, the biggest-selling men's magazine, asks its readers to calculate a "pay per lay" by working out how much money they've spent on their girlfriends - all those flowers, meals, fine wines - and dividing the figure by how much sex they got. Less than £5 per coitus is "too cheap - she's about the same price as a Cambodian whore". Why bother forging relationships when you can just buy a "Cypriot tart" off the street? James Brown, the former editor of Loaded who has since made a career out of advising media companies on appointing editors, said this week: "I think sex on a first date is fine as long as you get a receipt."

We are also witnessing an ugly and bizarre glorification of pimps. Pimps earn their money by pocketing the cash women earn by having sex with punters, and are usually violent; yet MTV's biggest hit TV show is Pimp My Ride, which takes people's rusty cars and turns them into vehicles that - well, look like they belong to a pimp. Our own Saturday Guide explained the phenomenon thus: "Everyone wants to look like a pimp these days. Or at least drive a car that a pimp might have lent them for the weekend." This show is deemed family entertainment. Mimicking gangsta rap stars such as Snoop Dogg, Selfridges' advertising campaign this Christmas portrayed a man made to look like a pimp, holding a goblet of champagne and draped with two half-naked women dressed like prostitutes. "Get your Christmas booty," ran the strapline. The rapper Nelly launched a drink called Pimp Juice; Virgin Atlantic ran an ad campaign for their upper class service called Pimp My Lounge.

This passion for prostitution has infected so many areas of public and cultural life. Selling your body is dressed up as a highbrow literary endeavour, not only by Belle de Jour but also in Tracy Quan's bestselling Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl - described as "a cross between Bridget Jones's Diary and Pretty Woman", and soon to be a movie in which the heroine, like the author, becomes a prostitute at 14. Victoria Beckham wears a T-shirt saying "Pillow talk is extra"; teenagers sport tops bearing the word "Whore"; schoolgirls carry pencil cases with the Playboy logo; celebrities such as Wayne Rooney and Jamie Theakston visit brothels; city firms take clients to lapdancing clubs; gyms offer pole-dancing classes; men go to websites to review prostitutes in the way you might review books on Amazon.

Somewhere along the line, paying for sex has lost its stigma.

In many ways, the increasing acceptability of prostitution reflects our sacrifice of morality and equality on the altar of capitalist ethics. Sex has been resolutely commodified, and it is hard to argue against anything if you are making money, since the making of money has become an acceptable moral justification in itself.

Meanwhile, women are being killed (since 1990, more than 70 prostitutes are known to have been murdered in the UK); they are being beaten and raped (60% of prostitutes say this has happened to them in the last year); and they are exploited because of their drug addictions (95% are dependent on heroin or crack). Former prostitutes report severe levels of trauma.

Paul Holmes, the former head of the Metropolitan police vice unit at Charing Cross, said: "In my 32 years working in vice, I can count on one hand the number of working girls who were not coerced or abused." The men who visit prostitutes are deluding themselves if they think what they're doing is just an another harmless commercial transaction, like shopping for gadgets.

It is a relief that the government did not give up on women and stepped back from legitimising prostitution as an acceptable commercial practice, as had been feared. But the law is not enough. If the normalisation of prostitution is to be reversed, we have to go further and make the buying and selling of women unacceptable in our national culture. We need a zero-tolerance approach - protests, complaints, refusals - to the use of prostitution in media, fashion and advertising, and to the promoters of the sex industry who pervade our public life. These people paint themselves as liberators, but in reality they undermine the social advances women have made, and degrade those they profess to respect.